NEW YORKERS took emergency action yesterday to survive a heat wave that has turned the Big Apple into the Baked Apple.

Giant video billboards in Times Square were dimmed to conserve electricity as record-breaking temperatures strained power supplies because of the surging use of air-conditioners.

The lights illuminating city landmarks such as the Brooklyn Bridge and Empire State Building were also switched off, and financial companies such as Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley shut down their electronic stock tickers.

Otto Lopez, a bicycle messenger who spends ten hours a day pedalling the city streets, said he had created a crude mobile air-conditioning unit by filling his backpack with ice.

“It’s crazy,” he complained as he rode on 42nd Street. “I could not ride my bike yesterday, it was so hot. When you go between the cars and a bus, there’s too much heat.”

Paul Clinton, a hotel doorman near Grand Central Station, said he just tried to stay out of the sun. “We are all right in the shade, but when the sun comes we’re on Mars,” he said.

The sweltering mood was captured by a cartoon in the New York Post showing the Statue of Liberty in a bikini. The Daily News headlined its front page: “Melting Pot”.

For many, however, there was no escaping the sweltering temperatures that touched 38.9C (102F) at La Guardia airport on Wednesday. “You’ve got to figure, it’s 100 degrees and I am working with a blowtorch that burns at 100 degrees. So that is 200 degrees,” said Terrence Haynes, a plumber. “And you always have to wear protective clothing, so it’s not like you can come to work in a sundress.”

The stifling heat that swept across the Midwest to the East Coast this week has claimed more than a dozen lives, two weeks after a similar heat wave in California killed at least 136.

The latest victims were an elderly couple who were found dead in their home in Newark, New Jersey, yesterday. Teams patrolled the streets looking for homeless people and encouraging them to stay at air-conditioned call-in centres. Officials in Washington, where temperatures have reached 37.8C, told people to stay off the streets.

In Boston, animals at the Franklin Park Zoo were kept cool with sprinklers and fed frozen food. The African wild dogs and lions got frozen blood, while the primates chilled out with frozen fruit juice.

Blackouts left 22,400 people without power in the Queens borough of New York and the northern suburbs.

Government figures show that America has suffered three times more extra-hot summer nights than normal — a trend that some scientists attribute to global warming.

From 2001 to 2005, nearly 30 per cent of the nation had “much above normal” average summertime minimum temperatures, the National Climatic Data Centre said. “Much above normal” means lows that are among the highest 10 per cent on record. In any year, about 10 per cent of the United States should have “much above normal” summer-night lows. Yet in 2005 and 2003, 36 per cent of the country had much above normal summer minimums and in 2002 the figure was 37 per cent.

Although the highest-ever level was 41 per cent in the 1930s, the rolling five-year average of 2001-05 is a record by far.

Meanwhile, much of southern Europe continued to swelter in a heatwave that last month killed 112 people in France and 13 in Spain.

but in sunny South Africa . . .

As people cooled off in New York, the normally sunny city of Johannesburg saw snow for the first time in eight years as temperatures dropped to 7C (44F)

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